Today, I write love stories, but my reading habits run more toward non-fiction books—about salt, or the Kennedys, or a family-run diner. I want to find the kind of love stories that speak to my experiences, so this year, I’m trying to figure out romance novels.Download the app to read more.
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Oh, hello, Maura Magazine has a new issue! A gorgeous, harrowing piece of fiction by Nick Antosca inspired the incredible cover. Plus: Maura Johnston on rock snobbery; Jess Driscoll on the need for better romance novels; and Jeremy Gordon on action heroes!
I’m in this issue! You should go subscribe and read because my essay is way better than the first time I wrote it. Thanks to Maura for her edits and the fastest turnaround from acceptance to publication, and thanks to Megan for telling me to submit something, even when I didn’t know what to submit.
Buffering [Sonny Payne]
When I was a percussionist in high school, we were responsible for keeping the jazz band, full orchestra, concert band, and marching band in time, and we did so through a haze of marijuana and hormones and passed-down stories of some guy’s uncle who saw Gene Krupa perform a 12-minute solo using every part of a high hat while eschewing the rest of the kit. And to this day, when I see videos like this, I get an urge to skip class and go make out with a bassoonist in a sound-proof practice room. After all, life is short, and lunch period is even shorter.
Did you read that? That was swell. One hundred five words. Less than half a page.
That’s all it took for this person (whom I’m pretty sure I’ve never met) to make my day. Now I want to follow this person or star this person or favr this person or whatever the fuck au courant verb box I need to mash on in order to see more things like that.
Yes, I realize I am — already, again, seemingly forever — carrying on like that weird relative who always smells of gin and Starlight mints as he threatens to “set you up with a sweet Doobie Brothers mix.” I love Starlight mints, but please don’t misunderstand me.
I genuinely enjoy looking at oversaturated pictures of coltish women I’ll never meet. I’m always game to make fun of “improperly” punctuated “signs.” And God knows I love reading (and posting) elliptical quotes from famous books I never finished reading. Stipulated.
But, brother. Do I ever wish more people would write little stories like Buffering’s. It’s just so wonderful. You know?
I mean, Jesus Christ, people, LOOK. We have keyboards! Literally right in front of us. Right this second.
This post is nearly four years old, and I think about it nearly every day. Every day when I make the clackity noise and especially the days when I don’t.
Your keyboard will have different things in it than mine does, of course. But, it’s impossible to know what’s in there until you’ve made the clackity noise for a few minutes. You think you know what’s in there. But you don’t. It’s not your brain that makes the clackity noise, it’s your fingers.Little stories come easy for me. I’ve written little stories my whole life. But the bigger they get, the harder they are to write. The secret is to break the big stories into little stories. 250 words in ten minutes, scene by scene, and if you work at that long enough, you’ll find you have a novel.
I used to feel like I would never write a novel, like I couldn’t. I’ve long thought that I’m more a poet than a prose writer. The first time I read a Harold Pinter prose poem, my brain went, yes, yes, yes. It was about cricket, and I don’t know anything about cricket, so I wrote one about hockey, dissecting Pinter’s structure and style.
This was before I started writing on the internet, and when I did, I recognised it as poetry immediately. I use whitespace and line breaks the way poets use whitespace and line breaks. It’s my punchline, my rhyming couplet.
I had been going about this novel thing all wrong. I was trying to write a novel like the ones we read in school. But what I was writing online wasn’t anything like that. The only way I’m ever going to write my novel is to write it my way: making the clackity noise, telling little stories, clicking them together into bigger stories, and knowing where to put the line breaks.
It’s been a quieter month than I had hoped for. I always know I’m not writing when I’m making too much of the wrong kind of noise, the whining instead of the clacking. I needed to read this again today, if only to remind myself that writing doesn’t happen in your head.
It happens in your fingers.
Year of Romance has just two rules: read more books and write more books. While I was at the library, picking up whatever looked interesting, in addition to a couple of Harlequin paperbacks, I also grabbed Why He Didn’t Call You Back, a dating self-help by Rachel Greenwald.
It’s not a list of symptoms and a course of how to change your life. It’s actually a list of archetypes and personality profiles. I don’t know how helpful it is for women looking for better dates, but as a writer, I found it super-fascinating. There are characters in here, waiting to be made real out of cutesy names, like The Bait & Switcher, The Sadie Hawkins, The Busy Bee.
Greenwald is a dating coach, by way of Harvard Business School, so her gimmick is what she calls the Exit Interview. She calls up failed dates and asks them why, what happened, and what went wrong. Years of these interviews has resulted in an extensive collection of anecdotes (collected in another book, Have Him at Hello) of reasons why some dates fail and some succeed.
Some are basic (she wiped up her spill at Starbucks), some are predictable (I just liked her ass), but there could be a story in all of them. Who is the man and who is the woman who get together and stay together because “her hair smelled like summer camp”? I want to know.
(via factsarenothing)I stayed up late last night to finish reading Time Out by Jill Shalvis. Not because it was amazing or I needed to know how things turned out, but because it was short.
Before I do a review, let me tell you a story.
A few years ago, I started watching As The World Turns. I had never watched soap operas before, the same way I have never read romances before. My mom watched Perry Mason in black and white in the afternoons. I remember a friend’s older sister had a poster of Paul from The Young and the Restless on her wall. (I didn’t know his name, only that he is a blonde, blue-eyed guy, and I still see him on the show, flipping past the channel, so I went for Wikipedia’s List of longest-serving soap opera actors.) She and their mom were the only soap opera fans I knew growing up.
And when I say I started watching As The World Turns, that’s not quite true. I started watching the Luke and Noah storyline, which people had edited out of the show and posted on YouTube. I caught up on years of daily episodes in a single night and could keep up in ten minute chunks with sometimes weeks between. The Luke and Noah storyline was something to be commended on network daytime television, but it wasn’t a priority for the producers. So the way I watched soap operas is still not how other people watch soap operas.
I draw this comparison to explain how out of my depth I felt watching a soap opera then and still feel reading romance novels now. I have no background in how they operate, the archetypes and the tropes. Soap operas look terrible to me. The acting is painful. Let’s not talk about the writing. Everything I know about both, I learned first through a disdain for the genre.
My mom read romances when she was a teenager, but only ever when she was babysitting. The mom of one of her regular charges had whole shelves of the books, and my mom would read one in an evening while the kids were asleep. We didn’t have them in our house when I was growing up.
When I worked my factory job, I’d see the other ladies reading paperback romances. There was a box of them in the locker room, a kind of primitive book swap. I would pick them up, skim through, but there was nothing about the long-haired, kilted men on the cover which enticed me. I wanted to read “real” books. I went through all the obnoxious literary phases in high school: Greek myths, Catcher in the Rye, Shakespeare, the Beats. I read a single V.C. Andrews on a dare from a friend.
Today, I’m more likely to be found reading a non-fiction book about salt or Robert Kennedy or 50-year-old family-run diner. I keep writing love stories, but the harder thing is finding ones I like to read.
Apologies to Jill Shalvis, but Time Out isn’t it either. I enjoyed how she bucked the stereotype of dudes with weird names and named the hero Mark and the heroine Rainey. There were many wonderful and interesting supporting characters. I loved Mark and Rick’s dad, Ramon, who was living in his new house (rebuilt after it burned) with no furniture because he hadn’t found anything new he wanted to buy. I loved Pepper, one of the teenage girls on the softball team and the keeper of Mark’s swear jar. They didn’t all get a lot to do in such a short book, but they made the world real.
But when you make a fictional world real, non-fiction problems can’t be ignored. Late in the story, at a fundraising bachelor auction, where Mark puts up his NHL players for bidding, he also ends up on the stage. Rainey tries to buy him, in some kind of misguided proof of true love, but is quickly outbid by the celebrities, socialites, and one “woman producer.”
This one line, one description of a character with no name, no dialogue, and no purpose beyond plot obstacle, poked me at the back of my brain for the rest of the book. It’s unnecessary, to begin with, to define a producer as a “woman producer.” The word “producer” works fine. English can be helpfully efficient when it wants to be. To quantify this producer as female assumes that people reading the book will read a producer as male. Which is even more offensive, because the majority audience of a Harlequin book is female.
But when you put this one sentence (one sentence, folks, and I’m already onto my third paragraph ripping it apart) into the context of a bachelor auction, to quantify this producer as female is also homophobic. Because it says only women are allowed to bid on dates with men. Not only says, but in a wholly prescriptive way, it prevents any reader from reading otherwise.
It’s a little thing. I imagine most readers would pass it by, the same way the writer and the editor passed it by. Because they’re probably used to it. If this isn’t their first romance novel, they’ve seen this kind of thing before. Time Out isn’t my first, but I’m still new enough to the genre that something as small as “woman producer” stops me up short.
I don’t know enough to let it go as “just one of those things.”
It’s a little thing. But in a book by a woman, written for women, and read under the covers by the daughters of women, don’t tell me the little things don’t count. Don’t tell me this cover isn’t racist. Don’t tell me we don’t deserve better love stories. I’ll tell you you’re wrong.
I could think of nothing more fitting than reading Pride and Prejudice as the first book of my Year of Romance, the year I finally figure these romance novels out and how I can write one better. But when I did some quick research, I discovered there is something more fitting: January 2013 marks the 200th anniversary of the novel’s publication. Like every great love story, it was meant to be.
It wasn’t meant to be when I was in school. We did Jane Eyre in grade 9, but I remember picking up Pride and Prejudice off the same classics rack at the library. I didn’t finish it.
In university, it was assigned as a compare/contrast with Bridget Jones’s Diary. We read them concurrently—not the whole books, but specific chapters which highlighted the connection between the two books. I read what was assigned, which means I didn’t finish it.
There’s a lot wrong with doing an English degree. The worst of it is slogging through books because you have to. (The worst of the worst is reading Frankenstein three semesters in a row because professor don’t talk to each other.) But the same way I couldn’t write a novel until I was ready to write a novel, I couldn’t read Pride and Prejudice until I was ready to read Pride and Prejudice.
I was ready this time. It grabbed me, and I wanted to read it. I wanted to know what makes it great. Because I want to make my books great, too.
This year is about figuring out how to write the kinds of books people want to read, not just me. I’ve started to tell people that I write books about normal people with boring lives, and then they fall in love. I don’t write about dragons or wizards, spies or hunters, aliens or pilots. A happy everyday life is about all the fantasy I can handle right now.
Mixed in with my History of Romance Novels syllabus, I’m reading recent contemporary books, too. The ones which look interesting at my local library, which basically means the ones with modern typography and are also often about women who bake.
After I finished Pride and Prejudice, I tried to read Fool For Love by Beth Ciotta. Right away, I didn’t like the heroine. I didn’t like the way she defined herself by the failure of her recent break-up, instead of the victory of her recent graduation from culinary school. She whined about leaving New York for a small town, she whined about the job handed to her, she whined about cupcakes. (Speaking of which, can we be done with cupcakes now?)
But none of this means our heroine deserves to grabbed and kissed against her will in a vulnerable and half-dressed moment. This is the first kiss from the two we know are destined to fall in love by the book’s end. This is where I stopped.
Perhaps it was the abrupt change from Austen’s Regency era discretion to Ciotta’s casually explicit language, but there were moments in Fool For Love which made me feel like a prude. I wonder if, like cable television did for network, Fifty Shades has made it OK for romance novels to drop random descriptions of hard cocks into the narrative. When characters are sitting in restaurants and eating dinner.
I want to read the dirty parts as much as the next girl. But there’s a way to write it that doesn’t make me feel like I accidentally changed the channel.
When I put down Fool For Love, I picked up How Sweet It Is by Sophie Gunn. Our heroine is a single mother, living in her run-down childhood home and working at the local diner. Our hero, a man passing through town, trying to escape the worst day of his life: a car accident, which killed someone.
There’s a lot going on here, with a missing bag of money, a mysterious white cat, a long-lost father, sibling rivalry, and accidental pregnancies. None of it really went together, but it all carries me along to the happy ending.
But I didn’t care whether our heroine and our hero got their happy ending. I didn’t hate Lizzie and Tay, but I didn’t like them either, and that’s the bigger fault. Characters can lead boring lives, but you have to give the reader something they can hold on to, something in them a reader can love.
Lizzie is a good mom. Tay is a remorseful person. That probably works for someone else, but it didn’t work for me. What I realised, though, is that it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. There are hundreds of romance novels published every year, which means there are hundreds of characters. By the law of large numbers, one of them will be exactly what you want. Every romance novel is another blind date.
This is also why it appears to be so easy to publish in the romance genre. The market demands more stories, more characters, more voices.
It’s my first lesson of my Year of Romance: the reader has to care about these people. It’s not an interesting story with social commentary. It’s a love story. You can throw as many fancy balls, overly-frosted cupcakes, and bags of money at the plot, but romance isn’t built on plot. It’s built on character. Two characters, actually, that a reader can love and root for and want to invite into their lives. So make them good.
The greatest trick Lance Armstrong ever pulled was convincing America he won the Tour de France by himself. Nobody wins the Tour by themselves, even the guys who do it clean.
In just a few days, the 2013 cycling season starts in Australia with a multi-day stage race called Tour Down Under (a lot of races are called Tour [Blank]. You’ll get used to it.) A lot of teams are already there, riding the roads, doing recon, acclimatizing to the insane heat. Only one rider is said to be the winner, but teams race together.
A professional cycling team has anywhere from 20-30 riders on its roster. But not everyone rides every race. You don’t send a climber to a one-day Classic. You don’t send a time trialist up a mountain. The seven-man teams in Australia will consist of a leader, a sprinter, a lead-out man, a climber, a rookie, and a couple of domestiques.
(Longer multi-day races also include a time trial, which means the team also includes a time trial specialist. Tour Down Under is only six stages, not quite enough time, but it’s also in Australia, while most teams are based in Europe. A time trial means a whole other set of bikes for the team, and can you imagine the shipping costs?)
The leader of a team races for the general classification. He is racing to win. The GC guy has to be an all-around rider. He has to be great on the flats, in the mountains, able to stay at the front of the peloton, and kill a time trial, if he has to. He’s the quarterback of the team, too, calling the play from on the road.
A GC rider can be flashy like Lance Armstrong or Alberto Contador, the centre of attention. Or riding under the radar, like Cadel Evans or Ryder Hesjedal, blowing past the field and winning because no one was paying attention. Every team wants to win, but the kind of GC rider they choose says everything about how they want to win.
Most teams bring along a rookie rider who might ride GC in the future. Young, but good at everything. This is how he gets the experience you need to win. Fostering new talent in this way has become such an important part of the sport, race organisers began awarding a jersey to the best young rider.
There are a lot of wins to go around in cycling. Climbers have their own prize, a polka-dotted jersey, which makes them the easiest rider to pick out of the group. There aren’t as many or as gruelling mountains in Australia as in the Alps, but climbing mountains on a bike is an integral part of the sport. It’s a point of pride for the climbers and necessary survival for the sprinters.
Sprinters go for the win at the end of every stage, forget about the end of the race. But a sprinter in cycling isn’t the same as a sprinter on the track. Before he even gets to the 100m line, he has to survive the four hours in the saddle, in the wind, in the mountains. Then, after he’s exhausted, a final burst of speed is needed to get him across the finish line.
That’s what a sprinter does on a bike. He, more explicitly than any other rider, is helped across the line by his lead-out man. The lead-out is a sprinter in his own right, but here, plays a supporting role. He rides at the front of the group, allowing the sprinter to draft as long as possible, then the lead-out gets out of the way.
The lead-out man is really a specific kind of domestique. From the French word for servant, domestiques are every rider who helps another rider to the finish. They ferry water bottles from the team car at the back, through the peloton of more than a hundred riders, all the way to the front where the team is riding. They wait for you when you need a nature break. They give you their own bike when yours breaks down.
A rider with a specific skill might find his job done before the race is over. Fabian Cancellara is a time trialist who often takes the first stage win at the Tour de France, rides in the yellow leader’s jersey for a few days, but when the race moves into the mountains, he becomes a domestique.
Jens Voigt wins Classics, the one-day races on mostly flat roads. Which doesn’t make him seem like the kind of rider a team wants on their team for three weeks in the mountains. Jens Voigt is a super-domestique. I think they invented the name just for him. At 41, he’ll be riding his 16th Tour de France this year. There’s no doubt in my mind his team will take him.
He’s a big guy who can ride forever without complaining. Put him at the front of the peloton for hours, and he’ll take the wind for everyone. Jens does the hard riding so his guys don’t have to. He also does it with the best attitude, the best sense of humour, and the best sense of morals in the peloton.
A few hundred words ago, I wrote that the general classification rider was the leader of his team, the quarterback. When the quarterback is someone like Lance Armstrong, the whole team suffers. Sure, they won a few races, but ask George Hincapie, ask Levi Leipheimer, ask Christian Vande Velde if Lance still invites them to his Superbowl party.
Someone like Jens, like Cadel, like Ryder, lifts their teams higher on their own victories. When confronted with praise, they point it elsewhere. Cycling is a team sport first, because no one can get through those long days and mountains alone. You need the guy to ride draft, and the one who brings you a bottle, and the other, your partner, to lead you out to fly across the finish line.
Even Lance figured out you can’t win alone. Except he picked doctors and bullies, instead of riders and domestiques. He picked the wrong kind of team.
I can’t tell you why everyone hates Sidney Crosby, but here’s why I hate Crosby:
Canada is a country of underdogs. When you get too big, we get suspicious. Crosby was good right away. I mean midget hockey right away. He made it look way too easy. He became a star so young. There’s just something of child prodigies that is suspect.
He was drafted by an American team. Sure, it was Pittsburgh because of Mario Lemieux, and Canada still loves Lemieux (we hate Brett Hull because he wants to be American), but still: the best player of his generation and we lose him to the US. And to Pittsburgh. Nobody likes Pittsburgh.
He lived at the Lemieux house for five years. That was just creepy.
He was named captain right away.
He’s a weird kid. Weird in that way that a lot of young, successful people are. Too serious and with a blank personality. He loves hockey, and that’s it. It’s not a reason to hate him, but it’s a reason he doesn’t quite fit in.
He’s all anyone wants to talk about. So, you have to understand how Canadians follow junior hockey. More cities in Canada have a junior team than an NHL team. (Vancouver has both: the Canucks and the Giants. Halifax, where most people grew up cheering for Montreal or Boston because they have no nearby NHL team, has the Mooseheads.) The World Junior Championship is a big deal like the Olympics.
What I mean by that is that we were already annoyed by how good Crosby was. We were hearing about him in Canada long before he was a glint in the NHL Draft’s eye. He became a song played too often on the radio. We were sick of his face, but we didn’t want to let him go.
It’s not fair, but on some collective level, Canada still isn’t over Gretzky’s trade to LA. Once we lost Gretzky, none of our guys were safe. We didn’t want to lose Crosby, too. But with only six Canadian teams in the NHL (at the time of his draft), what chance did we have? What chance do we ever have against America?
We want to be the best at this game because it’s ours. Hockey is our game. And we are the best. Except that most of our guys play for the other side. The other side being every city in the United States which gets another expansion team when the country that made hockey only has seven. And Canada had to fight for every single one.
I don’t hate Crosby anymore. I never really did. We don’t hate people in Canada. I can’t hate him anymore, not since the Olympics. The way he talks about hockey is the way I write about hockey. I can’t play, but I get to watch him, and it’s beautiful. I still think he’s a weird kid. But he’s growing into himself. Give him time. The price you pay for being that good is growing up where people can see you.
Sidney Crosby let the world see him. I have to love him for that.
YouTube - Verbotene Liebe - Chrolli Entry Emmy
I don’t really know what this is, but it sounds like a press package or maybe, since the title mentions “Emmy”, the introduction to a screener. It’s a few years out of date (Christian and Olli have lost their daughter, broken up, divorced, reunited, and remarried since this was put together), but it still serves as a nice intro to a storyline almost 5 years old now.
I didn’t grow up watching soap operas, so they’re rather frustrating for me to watch. I don’t know the structures and the tropes, and I often feel overwhelmed trying to keep up with a daily show. Which is why I love the people on YouTube doing the hard work of editing and translating these shows so I can follow just one storyline.
It’s why I loved even more when the show itself recognised their audience and created a vlog for two of their most popular characters. I don’t know how much was scripted and how much was improvised, but the actors, Jo and Thore, seemed miles more comfortable playing in front of a webcam, instead of following their often thin script on the actual show. Olli was freer with his kisses, Christian let Olli talk while he was always eating, and they laughed more. It just felt so much more fun, more them.
I don’t watch the show as regularly as I used to. Once they got Christian and Olli back together, the two of them settled back into their roles as the happy couple, ready to lend a friendly ear to everyone else’s troubles. (To be fair, Olli does work as a bartender.) But I check in, like they’re my friends, and I want to hear what’s going on. That’s how you’re supposed to watch a soap, right?
It hasn’t been cycling’s best summer. It should have been great. Both the Giro and the Tour had first-time winners, and there was the Olympics, too. A whole new international audience for the sport. Except there was also The Lance Thing.
Let’s not talk about The Lance Thing. The people who were there, the people who were invested, the people who feel betrayed, let them say their piece. Let’s talk about the future.
Every year, the cycling season ends with a party and a race in Curaçao. Seeing the photos of the riders swimming and playing tug-of-war is like seeing the riders on Spring Break. This is the end of their season, before the bikes go away for the winter, until the Tour Down Under in January. This year, it’s not just a break from the training, the pain, the travel. This year, it’s a break from cycling itself.
The sport they’re coming back to will not be the same. A few of the big name teams haven’t yet been approved for racing in the ProTour next year. RadioShack, Movistar, and Katusha have all been sent down for further review. Rabobank won’t be Rabobank next year, and even more sponsors have pulled their support from a number of teams and races. Just as things adjusted when Lance Armstrong retired, cycling is going to be a whole new sport all over again.
This is the a great moment for cycling and its fans. This is the moment to decide to be a cycling fan. Stick with us now, with the veterans, who rode through the bad times and came out clean, with the new riders with new chances to make their marks, with the teams like Garmin, making a safe space for the riders who only want to ride.
You can choose to leave, and we won’t hold it against you. But cycling is something new again. and we want you to come along. Bring a friend. Introduce someone new to cycling. Because there are good people trying to make this a good sport, and we need all the help we can get.
I’m ready for the new faces. I’ll get used to the new names. I’ve done it before. It seems like Garmin has a new name after the hyphen every season. Time for a new city to embrace cycling. Time for a new country to become the powerhouse. Let’s see more Tours in African countries. Let’s see a Japanese rider take the yellow jersey. Let’s see Canada’s races grow and move out west. Let’s see America come back, and let’s remind them that Lance was wrong.
It is about the bike.
I never did Spanish in school, but I did linguistics, and I remember hearing about a national body that maintains the Spanish language. Keeps it regulated, and I thought that sounded like the worst thing ever. People complain about English, but what other language allows you the same freedoms. I love nouning verbs and verbing nouns. I just saw a post recently from a linguistics student writing a paper about the new language of Tumblr: the “I can’t” and “I can’t even”.
But maybe it’s because I’m Canadian. We sit at the awkward crossroads of British and American English. I’m constantly looking up spellings on Wikipedia to remind myself if I should use a C or an S, an A or an E. I tend towards the British, yes. I spell most Z words with Ss, and I always add the U. But the answer is pick something and stick with it. Because in Canada, Britishisms and Americanisms are both correct.
You know why English has so many more words than other languages? Because we use them all.
As much as we’d all love to cut the cord, sports fans can’t leave cable behind so easily. We’re lucky in Canada; hockey airs on our national public television station at the bottom of the dial. Cycling fans don’t have it so easy. Even when we think we’ve found a reliable source of coverage, up there in the triple digits, with the soccer and the motorsports, cycling will always get bumped.
I didn’t have a chance to watch the Vuelta a España before this year. We can count on coverage of the Tour de France, but no cycling race is as big as the Tour. Especially in North America. This year, though, I’m living with a soccer fan who pays for the European sports channels.
Yes, cycling gets bumped. More often than not, I turn on the TV and find baseball instead of bikes. But, going into the last week of a three week race, the schedule seems to have settled into late morning instead of primetime. It’s only the last two hours of an often four hour stage, but I’ll take it.
When I started watching cycling, it was the first Tour without Lance Armstrong. That was 2006, when Floyd Landis won in dramatic fashion, though we didn’t know until later why. It was a great time to fall for cycling, despite the doping problems which still dog the sport. Without a seven-time winner in the field, cycling was brand new.
The Vuelta is brand new to me, but this year, something is different. On the Grand Tour schedule, after the Giro d’Italia in May and the Tour in July, the Vuelta comes last. It comes before the World Championships, and this year, after the Olympics. Most of the biggest names in cycling chose to race the shorter USA Pro Challenge instead the Vuelta.
The biggest, however, made the trip. Granted, he didn’t have to go far. The 2012 Vuelta a España is Alberto Contador’s first Grand Tour after a two-year doping ban saw him lose two previous titles. He’s in his home country with a lot to prove. He thought this would be easy. He thought this would be a ride in the mountains with a few of his friends.
Contador didn’t think that Joaquim Rodríguez, coming off a second place finish at this year’s Giro, was in the form of his life. He tested Rodríguez, attacked him in the mountains again and again. It’s the same tactic we’ve seen Contador use in the past. This is how he beat the Schlecks. This is how he beat Lance Armstrong when they were teammates.
Contador has no shame. He is a ruthless rider, and that is how he wins. Winning a road race isn’t turning your wheels faster than the other guy. It’s strategy, too. Actually, it’s strategy more.
Going into Stage 17, Joaquim Rodríguez was still in the leader’s jersey, had been in the leader’s jersey since Stage 4. He didn’t expect to make it this far. He expected Contador to take the lead in the time trial. When that didn’t happen, Rodríguez, and the rest of us, started to believe he could win the whole thing.
28 seconds behind, stuck in second place, Alberto Contador looked weak. Not in the legs. He attacked Rodríguez all the way up the mountain. He tried to pull away. But Rodríguez looked better. He looked stronger. He didn’t ride away because he didn’t have to. Rodríguez stayed on Contador’s wheel, and he stayed in the lead.
Then Contador made the right move. It happens like that in cycling. He made the right move at the right time, and Rodríguez wasn’t paying attention. Contador got away in a break. He stayed away. He climbed the mountain all on his own. He won two and a half minutes on Rodríguez, and he won the stage.
Alberto Contador is going to win this year’s Vuelta. It’s not just a matter of time anymore: a minute 52 on second place, two minutes 28 on third. He’s going to win because he’s won before. With every attack, Contador learned a little bit more about Joaquim Rodríguez and what he brought to the Vuelta. It looked like Contador couldn’t beat him.
But he was waiting. He was learning. He was saving himself for the move to do the most damage. On Stage 17, Contador didn’t just break the field, he broke Rodríguez, too. Holding off the biggest name in the peloton proved too much. Rodríguez’s race is done.
So the Vuelta will end the way they said they Vuelta would. But it wasn’t easy for Alberto Contador. This was a race. This was a challenge, the kind he hasn’t faced since he became a star.
The kind that makes sport sport, instead of a ride in the mountains with a few of your friends.
Jonathan Vaughters, How to Get Doping Out of Sports
The timing of this admission isn’t coincidence. Vaughters rode with Lance Armstrong in the ’90s. He knows he’ll be called to testify. Perhaps he’s already been subpoenaed. We knew how Vaughters feels about doping. His team, Garmin, is the most openly and stridently anti-doping team in the peloton. He recruited the most famous reformed ex-doper, David Millar, for just that reason. (Also, dude can ride.)
Now we know why Vaughters has taken on the cause. Now we know for sure.
I hate that this is daily life for cycling fans. I hate that we’re still talking about this. I hate that riders I love keep getting caught.
But I love Vaughters for this article, and I love Millar for telling the media, after winning Stage 12 of this year’s Tour, “Don’t stop calling me an ex-doper.”
The fuck-ups will change this world.
(via generalclassification)In 2008, Mark Cavendish was the only British cyclist who failed to medal at the Olympics. He competed on the track that year, not the road, and placed 9th in the Madison. His partner in that race was Bradley Wiggins. For himself, Wiggins won two gold medals, but had nothing left to help Cav along. They didn’t speak for months after the Olympics ended.
It’s a story I hadn’t heard before, but which adds an edge to their story today. Wiggins and Cavendish race together on Team Sky in their professional life. As the fastest sprinter in the peloton, and the current rider with the most stage wins, Cavendish is used to being the centre of his team. He’s used to riding behind a leadout of three or four guys, then taking the win in a sprint.
But when your team holds the yellow jersey in the Tour de France, as well as the best chance to win it in Paris, a sprinter’s dreams fall to the sidelines. Mark Cavendish gave up not just stage wins, but his defense of the green jersey he won last year. He gave it up for yellow, which means more to the team and to Britain, a country who has never seen a rider of their own win a Grand Tour.
By the time the last time trial was over, Bradley Wiggins knew he had won the Tour de France. While the final stage along the Champs-Élysées is mostly tradition, a victory lap for the Tour winner, complete with champagne, the sprinters have one last finish line to cross. This year, the yellow jersey rode the leadout to get his teammate the win. When Mark Cavendish took the win in the last stage of the Tour de France, Bradley Wiggins cheered like it was his own.
That leadout was only the beginning of an apology for 2008. The Brits have a full five-man team at the 2012 Olympics in London. They’re not only the hometown favourites, they’re also the strongest team in the Olympic peloton. First, there’s Bradley Wiggins, two stages, 14 days in yellow, and the first Brit to win the whole Tour. Chris Froome came in second and took a stage win in the mountains. Mark Cavendish wears the rainbow stripes as the current World Road Race Champion. The three of them, with Ian Stannard, ride together all year long on Team Sky. Only David Millar races against them when they’re not at the Olympics. He won a stage at the last Tour, too.
Great Britain’s team is ridiculously strong. It sounds like the makings of a boring race. Five hours on the road and everyone thinks they know who’s going to win. The smart money has been on Cavendish since he was named to the national team. Instead, the home team’s strength means every other country works that much harder to bring them down. It means every other country works together to make the British work for it. It makes for breakaways, chases, and solo attacks—all the drama cycling fans like to see on the road.
Going into any race as the favourite is hard. Going into the Olympics in your home country after winning the biggest cycling race in the world is the hardest of all. Great Britain was cocky, and though cocky often works for Cav, it didn’t work today. One by one, his team fell behind: Chris Froome with a mechanical, and David Millar, too. Then we saw Bradley Wiggins riding at the back of the peloton. The breakaway stayed away, like it almost never does.
In the end, Alexandre Vinokourov of Kazakhstan won the gold. Vino has said he’s retiring, that he’s ridden his last Tour, and this will be a nice cap to a long career. But this wasn’t how Great Britain’s Olympics were supposed to begin. This wasn’t how Wiggins wanted to say sorry.
You can’t make gold with yellow. The road decides the race.
I miss Cav and Renshaw on the same team together so much. I clicked this link to Renshaw’s blog post on Cycling News simply because I was hoping for a Cav mention. Because it wasn’t a break-up. It wasn’t their choice when HTC folded. Each rider has to find the best team for themselves, and it turned out the best team for themselves wasn’t the best team together. It means, though, that Mark Renshaw and Mark Cavendish are still friends, even if they’re no longer teammates.
It wasn’t a break-up. Now, it’s more like a long-distance relationship. We still see photos of the two of them chatting before races, riding next to each other in the peloton, and racing each other in the sprints. Cavendish is still the fastest, but Renshaw has been let off his leash a little. He’s the best sprinter on a team of climbers. It’s his turn to win some stages at the Tour. Just as Renshaw predicts Cav in the running to win the points jersey, I know Cav would be ecstatic to see Renshaw take his first stage at a Grand Tour. I think he would be happy to come second in that sprint.
I used to call them the best song-and-dance team in the peloton. The way they worked together was magical. It was the best example of the selflessness that happens in road racing. When you’re at a big race like the Tour de France, the biggest of the big races, the biggest there is, you’re there for your team. Renshaw knew that he was there to get Cav across the finish line. Nine riders from each team, but only one can be the leader. Only one can stand on top of the podium in Paris.
But there are other victories to be won along the way. There are little sprints and big sprints, little mountains and big mountains, and there are jerseys for each stage and each climb and each day that a rider goes out and makes the most of his own race. There are a lot of little ways to win at the Tour, and one of those ways is to make sure the guy on your wheel crosses the line. Renshaw knows what the little victories are like. It would be nice to see him get a big one for himself.
(via generalclassification)